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Archive for the 'WordStar' Category

WordPerfect (Edward Mendelson), and the whole XyWrite mailing-list community to give us a wonderful, stable platform for running our old workhorse software under Windows XP through 10, both 32-bit and 64-bit. Up to today, I’ve run WordStar mostly under TameDOS, not vDos (or vDosPlus), and exclusively on 32-bit machines; my interest in vDos and vDosPlus […]

My favorite word-processing program is the versatlie, customizable, and powerful WordStar for DOS, last updated in 1992. Running it under Microsoft Windows can be difficult, particularly with 64-bit versions of Windows, and especially with recent versions (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1). But a free new MS-DOS emulator called vDos makes it easy […]

NOTE: For information on using WordStar with modern computers under Windows, see my instructions here. Thirty years ago today, on Friday, December 16, 1983, I started learning the word-processing program WordStar. I’d bought my first computer, an Osborne 1 CP/M luggable (24 pounds, the most portable computer in the world back then — see picture […]

Today is the 20th anniversary file-stamp date of the DOS TSR keyboard-macro program I use: SmartKey 6.0g Advanced, created by Australia’s FBN Software — an absolutely amazing program that I rely on daily. (I use WordStar for DOS, which is great on its own, but the combination of it with SmartKey has let me customize […]

Stumbled on this quite by accident, and found it an interesting coincidence, given that my current novel, Wake, deals with a blind teenager trying to deal with computers: a January 2006 technical paper entitled “A Personal Information Management Approach for People With Low Vision or Blindness” by Silas S. Brown and Peter Robinson of University […]

I still write with WordStar for DOS, and I note that today marks the 15th anniversary of the file-stamp date on the last version ever released: WordStar for DOS 7.0 Revision D was finalized December 21, 1992. I’ve customized the hell out of WordStar over the years, and love it. It’s fast, rock-solid, wonderfully optimized […]

To my absolute delight, I got an email this week from Seymour Rubenstein. He was the founder of software maker MicroPro International, and co-creator (with Robert Barnaby) of WordStar, the great old wordprocessing program (originally for the CP/M operating system, and later for MS-DOS). To this day, I still use WordStar for DOS 7.0, Revision […]